By James WisemanPublished November 17th 2008 in Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The U.S. Senate race in
Georgia is going to a runoff Dec. 2, because the Libertarian candidate,
Allen Buckley, got just enough votes to prevent either the Republican
Saxby Chambliss or the Democrat Jim Martin from getting a majority.

Georgia voters, many of whom waited in line for hours to cast their
ballots, will have to go back to vote again. The runoff is an extra
expense for a state government that is already in a budget crisis, and
a serious inconvenience for every voter who will have to somehow find
the time for another trip to the polling place. Many will be unable or
unwilling to vote again, which means that the results will reflect the
desires of a smaller proportion of the original voting population.

The problem with our voting system is obvious. On Nov. 4, each voter
was asked for his or her first choice for senator. Why make us come
back a month later to ask us again? Why not ask us for our first and
second choices on Election Day? In the Senate race in Georgia, no one
got a majority. Since Buckley came in last, he would be eliminated, and
each of Buckley’s voters’ ballots would be switched to their second
choices. It is exactly what happens in a runoff, except that it is done
immediately, without forcing us to hold another election.

This system is called instant runoff voting. Its advantages are
obvious and more and more places around the United States and the world
are adopting it, including Vermont, North Carolina, Louisiana,
California, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand.

In our presidential elections, there is no runoff at all, so our
system can produce a winner who is clearly not the people’s preferred
candidate. Fortunately, that was not the outcome last Tuesday. But in
Florida in 2000, an instant runoff system would have shifted
third-place Nader’s votes over to Gore, avoided the chaos of the
Florida recount and the involvement of the Supreme Court and none of us
would have ever heard of hanging chads. To be balanced, Bill Clinton
might not have beaten George H. W. Bush in 1992 if Ross Perot’s voters
had been asked about their second choice.

The problem with not holding a runoff is that voters are never asked
about their second —- or third or fourth choices. Democracy means
choosing a winner who best reflects the people’s preferences. How can
that happen if they are never even asked about their preferences?

Our system is an absolute disaster during presidential primaries,
when each party starts with half a dozen serious candidates. How can
the primary election outcome accurately reflect our wishes when we list
only our top choice and are not even asked about the remaining
candidates? The instant runoff system asks us to rate all the
candidates, and uses that information to pick that winner who best
reflects our preferences.

Conventional runoff elections are at best expensive and
time-consuming. The only thing worse than holding a runoff is not
holding a runoff, since that can lead to an election outcome that
ignores the people’s wishes.

We do not use primitive paper ballots anymore. Why are we still
using a primitive election method? Instant runoff voting is a simple
system that allows us to express all of our preferences to choose the
best candidate, and avoids the expense, wasted time, and undemocratic
results of our current system.

We have two years until the next Congressional elections and four
years until the 2012 presidential election. So individual states, which
establish voting procedures, have time to fix an antiquated and
sometimes unfair method of counting Americans’ votes. It would be nice
to see Georgia take the lead.

—- James Wiseman, associate professor of mathematics at Agnes Scott College, studies the mathematics of voting and chaos theory.